I recently installed Gentoo on my desktop machine, which is quite old and busted, and I knew I could give it a better life with Gentoo. It operates better than my 2-year old laptop, and it itself is from the WinVista age.

And will all this power my laptop has, and it runs Arch with systemd, it boots in 15.84 seconds. While my old and busted desktop boots in 9.54 seconds with systemd(because I can't live without GNOME). How amazing is Gentoo?!?! I will probably consider switching on my laptop!!
What are your thoughts on Gentoo's amazingness

Some people tell me Gentoo isn't a distro built for speed. Is that true?

Gentoo isn't built, as you built it yourself.
And its aim isn't speed, its aim is more to let you choose YOUR own aim.

But to let you have your aim gentoo have USE flag.
And you don't need any benchmark to solve that : compare one OS with a program loaded and unused and another OS that simply doesn't have the program because the user didn't install it.

So a Gentoo depend on user using it: some want fast boot, some stability, some speed, some size, some a mix of any, some only free, some only gpl, some...

you have just denied quite a lot of people being users. It's like if you said a DIY car is for all kinds of users. I don't think many cars' users would agree.
(I wouldn't mind though, if I someone else made a car for me according to my specs. This, however, is not DIY anymore)

Right. Gentoo can also make a lot of sense on coporate level. It may take more time initially, but in the long run, it will save you time.

I was recently thinking how travis CI sucks, because it's ubuntu and so limited about toolchain etc. Imagine it running on gentoo... all they would need to do is make their own binpkg host and feed all clients with those. You would then have the toolchain control of a real gentoo. Really useful for a build service.

Heh ... I still run Gentoo on a laptop from, uhhh, the "Windows 95" age.

It seems to be having some "arthritic moments" these days, but in days past it has had "uptimes" of more than one year.

Gentoo allowed me to build a customized kernel which contains exactly the device-support for exactly what devices this machine has, and to build those drivers into the kernel. Then, to build as modules the support for exactly those USB-devices that I might from time to time plug into it. In this way, the entire "halfway-booted" step is eliminated completely, and the kernel starts immediately. All of the software that runs, likewise, is exactly tailored to this machine.

"That's great." "That's amazing, in fact ..." if that's what you want and need. It's the extreme opposite of "manage somehow to sort-of boot on anything," which of course is also a worthy (and difficult-to-achieve) goal.

If your's is 'old and busted' mine looks like a horse (not even the buggy) that's been beaten, and i'm also getting insane performance gains. Not using systemd myself (nothing against it just decided not to use it). Very minimal setup, using startx and i3-wm it boots in less then 10 seconds. Gentoos aim may not be speed, but it's speed (if done right) is undeniable.

Something sounds amiss if it takes that long for your laptop to boot. I used to have an old Dell Inspiron 1525 with a slow SSD and it fully booted into KDE from a cold boot in less than 15 seconds and that was Gentoo/OpenRC. My old think pad when on arch with systemd was still less than 10 seconds with no tweaking.

Something sounds amiss if it takes that long for your laptop to boot. I used to have an old Dell Inspiron 1525 with a slow SSD and it fully booted into KDE from a cold boot in less than 15 seconds and that was Gentoo/OpenRC. My old think pad when on arch with systemd was still less than 10 seconds with no tweaking.

I don't get your point; his is less than 10 seconds too, and let's face it, how often do you really have to reboot? I don't even notice boot times, so "less than 10 seconds" is fine, as a guesstimate.